Indeed, violence committed by Trump supporters against their critics is sometimes fake. The Empire actor Jussie Smollett famously hoaxed a hate crime in which men in Trump hats allegedly yelled ‘this is MAGA country’ before placing a noose around his neck. Smollett has been indicted for this farce.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen anti-Trumpers normalize violent rhetoric, such as MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace suggesting she’d like to wring former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’s neck, or the New York Times publishing a Trump assassination fantasy. Former GQ writer Julia Ioffe insisted on television that Trump has radicalized more people than Isis, while MSNBC terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance nominated a Trump property in Turkey to be bombed by the radical terror group.
Doesn’t such rhetoric constitute ‘incitement, plain and simple,’ as ABC’s Cecilia Vega argued during the 2016 election, or could it ‘motivate a crazy,’ as NBC’s Chuck Todd claimed? Why doesn’t this logic apply to leftist violence?
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